POSITIONS: NO SEX IN THE CHAMPAGNE ROOM?

       Mary Taylor and Carol Leigh

       ISSUE 2.1 (2006)

An average dancer in the 1980s earned anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a week—an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. By the mid-1990s, the industry took a turn. Dancers no longer got paid by the show—instead they got sixty dollars per shift. Recently it has declined to getting paid nothing at all. When lap dancing and contact with customers kicked in, many dancers were forced to quit their jobs; some threw in the towel, others resorted to lap dancing or turned to drugs or alcohol to cope. Nothing could change the path that dancing was headed toward.

When word got out that you could earn at least twenty dollars for every three-minute (dirty) dance, prostitutes came in off the cold streets and moved their business into strip clubs. Dancers that would normally never do dirty dances felt they had no choice but to follow suit. If they didn’t, the other girls would. Club owners realized how much money was being made in the VIP rooms and began charging the dancers fees to go to work. Hence, they became pimps. And clients got spoiled, receiving big services for twenty dollars.

VIP rooms and champagne rooms—I don’t think so. Used condoms and cum-stained furniture are common and women are seen blatantly giving clients hand jobs, or allowing clients to finger them. Dancing? I don’t think so! How can a legitimate dancer make money these days? The club owners won’t pay her for her talents and the clients won’t pay her unless she performs sexual acts. The lines have been crossed so badly that the strip clubs have become bawdy houses. I feel uncomfortable referring to these women as “dancers.” They are not dancers! They are prostitutes!

I don’t have a problem with women that choose to be prostitutes, have their own business, work from their home, or do outcalls. What I have a problem with are the prostitutes that use strip clubs to provide their services to the strippers’ clients. They know NOTHING about the art of slowly and seductively removing their clothing while teasing and entertaining clients.

In closing, all I have to say is get out of the strip clubs and go back to the streets or use your own venues.

—Mary Taylor

I never worked at the strip clubs. I’ve been a prostitutes’ rights advocate, so I am primarily concerned with prostitutes’ perspectives. Conflicts between workers about prostitution in the strip clubs are old news, but have been newly exacerbated due to the changing sex industry.

This issue is particularly confusing because of evolving definitions of prostitution. Is lap dancing prostitution? Many lap dancers insist it is not. Cities have different answers, and it depends on case law. My Australian prostitute activist friends explain that where “shop-based” prostitution is legal, dancing and prostitution can exist at the same club. In countries where overt “shop-based” prostitution is prohibited, like the United States and Canada, the enmity between dancers and prostitutes is exacerbated.

It’s a no-win situation. The booming exotic dance industry is the flip side to the prohibition of prostitution. The tease is legal, but actual sex is not. Criminalization of prostitution and stigmatization of “The Slut” pits women against each other, separating the “good girls” from the “bad girls,” and the “bad girls” from the “very bad girls.”

In this environment, with market demands lowering prices so that one can no longer make the big bucks for a beaver show, certainly dancers have a valid interest in keeping prostitution out of the clubs. But when people insist there should be no prostitution at all in strip clubs, we say, “But there is.” This reminds me of the old days when the neighborhood groups seemed to have good reasons for getting prostitutes off their streets. But where should prostitutes go with their limited options? NIMBY and NIMSC. Not In My Back Yard. Not In My Strip Club.

Some may propose a return to the old days; the price women have paid for decreases in sexual protectionism has resulted in greater expectations and perhaps more potential for exploitation. The challenge for sex workers is the very long haul of owning our erotic labor as individuals and communities and learning to work together through these divisions.

—Carol Leigh

MARY TAYLOR, a former stripper of twenty-one years, was the founder of the Exotic Dancers’ Association of Canada and the author of Bedroom Games. Ms. Taylor is an expert in the exotic entertainment industry, founder of the “Peel and Play” workshops, and president of Live Girl Productions, Inc.

CAROL LEIGH is a sex worker activist, performer, and filmmaker. Leigh coined the term “sex work” in 1978. She has been a spokesperson for COYOTE, a member of SWOP and Desiree, and was a founder of BAYSWAN. Leigh coordinated a street outreach project, volunteered at a needle exchange, and represented the SF Commission on the Status of Women on the Board of Supervisor’s Task Force on Prostitution. In 1999, she founded the San Francisco Sex Workers Film and Arts Festival. She is the author of Unrepentant Whore: Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot.